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Attica Locke is a force to be reckoned with and the first mystery in the Highway 59 series, Bluebird, Bluebird was outstanding, so I jumped when I saw this, the second in the series available to review. My thanks go to Net Galley and Mulholland Books for the review copy. It will be available to the public Tuesday, September 17, 2019.

Darren Mathewsis
a Black Texas Ranger, and his work is to unmask and prosecute members of the
sinister Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. When the story opens we see that our
protagonist is still drinking; he and his wife Lisa, who were estranged during
the last book, have reached a détente of sorts. He will still drink, but it
will be civilized consumption in front of his wife. A glass of beer. There.
See, was that so bad? He has it handled. In exchange, he agrees to bring his
work off the road, and so he is assigned to a supervisory position directing
other officers in pursuit of the ABT. He doesn’t want to drive a desk, but it’s
a concession he makes for her.

But Darren has gotten himself into an awkward spot, a
compromising one. His mother—a woman that did not raise him but with whom he
has recently developed a relationship of sorts—says it’s a shame that nobody
has found the .38 used to kill Ronnie Malvo. Mack, who is dear to Darren, is a
suspect in that homicide, and his mother has the gun. He tells himself that his
frequent contact with her is a sign that they have a closer relationship and
that the money and gifts he brings her are a pleasure for him to provide. But
it’s not true; actually, his mother is blackmailing him.

And before you know it, he’s drinking hard, anywhere and
everywhere that Lisa can’t see it.

Everyone that reads a lot of fiction in general or mysteries
in particular develops a mental list of things they are tired of seeing. I for
one could die happy if I never saw another alcoholic protagonist; I am also
weary of seeing mean mothers. Why does every author have to take a pot shot at
motherhood? But for every item on my list, there’s an exceptional writer that
gets a pass because their prose is so solid, their voice so clear and resonant,
their pacing so flawless, their characters so credible. Locke is one of those
writers. (And to be fair, there are other features on my no-no list that Locke
avoids nicely.)

So there’s the iffy marriage; there’s the bottle; there’s
the blackmailing mama. But that’s not the half of it. Darren is sent into the
field, despite his protests and his promise to Lisa, because there’s a missing
child–the child of a member of the ABT– who has last been seen in a
historically Black community, and the Rangers need a Black lawman to ease the
way of the investigation. The Rangers don’t have a lot of Black officers to
call out.

So next thing we know Darren is out in the boondocks,
serving as a companion officer to a Caucasian sheriff that doesn’t really want
much to do with Darren. In fact, the local power brokers, all of them white, are
visibly uncomfortable in his presence, particularly when he enters private
homes. And he knows that information is being withheld from him, not only by
these people but also by Leroy Page, an elderly African-American man that was
the last one to see Levi alive.

Locke is noteworthy for the way she creates a sense of
disorientation, a murk that starts with the setting—swampy, dark, wet—and extends
into the characters that withhold information and make remarks that are both
overly general but also sometimes loaded with double meaning that he can’t
decode. And into all of this mess comes his best friend Greg, a Caucasian FBI man that has been sent in to
explore the possibility of a hate crime here.

Part of Locke’s magic is her perceptive nature and the way
she segues political events into the storyline. And so the pages fairly vibrate
with betrayal when Greg, who knows from Darren that Leroy has not been
forthcoming and won’t permit a warrantless search of his home, says that Leroy
is guilty of a hate crime. The current administration takes a low view of such
matters, Greg points out, and after all, Leroy referred to him as the “HCIC;
Head Cracker In Charge.” Darren takes exception:

“Cracker and nigger are not the same, and you know it,” Darren said.

“If we don’t prosecute hate crimes against whites—if that’s what this is,” Greg said, just to get Darren to hear him out, “if we don’t prosecute crimes against white lives to the degree that we do those against black lives—“

Darren laughed so hard the bourbon nearly choked him.

“They need to see the FBI taking every hate crime seriously.”

“So this is the Jackie Robinson of federal hate crime cases?”

It’s preposterous, of course. For one thing, as Darren
points out, there’s no body. The child may be alive. But he is shaken by his
friend’s behavior, and when Lisa drives out to visit on her day off, Darren is
further concerned by how intimately she and Greg regard one another. It’s one
more thing he doesn’t need, and at this point he has nobody left, apart from
his very elderly uncle, who tells him the truth and isn’t hiding anything. He does his best to help Leroy, but Leroy
doesn’t trust him and is also not telling him everything, and he’s forced to
recognize that this elderly man that reminds him of his uncles and Mack is,
after all, another stranger.

Meanwhile, Darren makes a decision that knocks up against
the ethics that his upbringing and his profession demand.

The tension builds and there’s no putting this book down. I
stayed up late because I couldn’t sleep until I knew the outcome, which I did
not see coming.

Locke is brilliant and seems to me like a shoo-in for a
Grand Masters Award. This book and the one before it are highly recommended.

People talk about having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I had a pair of imaginary bill collectors, so no matter which way I turned, there was somebody to remind me I needed money. That’s how I ended up on a train at four o’clock in the morning with my nephew and a hundred pounds of weed.

Bryn Greenwood met acclaim with All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, which
I also read and reviewed, and I liked it a lot, but The Reckless Oath We Made is special, possibly the best novel we’ll
see in 2019. The charm of the narrative voice is just as strong as the last if
not more so, but there’s greater character development. It’s quirky and
groundbreaking, and I will love this story until the day I die. My thanks go to
Net Galley and Putnam for the review copy. You can buy it now.

Zhorzha—you can call her Zee—is
in a state of perpetual crisis. Her father is in prison for robbery, and her
mother has fallen apart, become a hoarder, massively obese, and agoraphobic to
boot. At age 12, Zee was forced to leave home, and has been sofa cruising ever
since. Recently she’s been staying with her sister LaReigne, but now LaReigne has
been kidnapped. Zee and her nephew Marcus are stranded with nobody left to call
for a ride; then her stalker steps forward and offers them a lift, and she
takes it.

It’s the beginning of something
beautiful.

Gentry has been following Zee for
years; he saw her at physical therapy when she was recovering from a serious accident,
and the voices in his head told him that he must be her champion. He doesn’t
harass her, but he is always there. When all hell breaks loose, Gentry
transports her to her mother’s house, but it’s even worse there. She is
humiliated to have him—or anyone—see what kind of squalor her mother has
chosen, but Gentry sees her mother
entirely differently, and since his narrative is peppered alternately with Zee’s
and occasional glimpses of side characters’ perspectives, he tells us:

There, in the inner chamber, reclined upon a throne of red leather that scarce contained her serpentine hugeness, was the dragon Lady Zhorzha called Mother. My lady was blessed with a great mane of fire that ne comb ne blade might tame. Mayhap in the dragon’s youth, she had worn such a mantle, but in her age, her hairs weren grayed.

Fearless, Marcus approached the throne and flung himself upon the lady dragon. For a time, there was kissing and lamenting, for they weren greatly distressed with the fate of my lady’s sister…I would go upon my knee, but the dragon’s hoard was too close upon her.

At one point someone asks Zee
whether she talks like Gentry too, and she replies, “Honestly, I don’t always
understand what he says. I got a C in English in high school, and we never got
to Shakespeare. I wasn’t in the advanced class.”

In fact, the juxtaposition of
Gentry’s old world speech and Zee’s contemporary, frank responses that keep the
story hopping. I laughed out loud several times when we moved from his speech
to hers, for example:

Lady Zhorzha! Art’ou well?

Oh, thank fuck, Gentry. Yes. We’re okay.

But as much as I love Gentry, I
love Zee harder. Zee is utterly believable, and she is unlike any other
character I have read anywhere. She explains, when she’s asked whether she goes
hunting with Gentry, that she wouldn’t know how; she comes from generations of “citified
white trash whose main food-related struggle has to do with “opening dented
cans of off-brand Spam from the food bank.”

Zee is a large woman, and I am so
heartily tired of tiny-firecracker female protagonists that I am cheered tremendously.
She’s nearly six feet tall, and her
uncle says she is “Built like she could hunt bear with a stick.” When she is
leaving the emergency room after a scare involving her mother, a staff member
advises Zee to lose weight herself. One of Gentry’s friends notes that “Honestly,
if she dropped fifty or sixty pounds, she would be pretty hot.”

And the thing I appreciate the
most about this is that her weight not our central problem. It isn’t a problem
at all. Zee is a romantic heroine who is fat, but this is an incidental part of
her character. The problem is the kidnapping, and it’s complicated by all of
the other challenges faced by poor people, challenges that Zee has to face
without much of a tool kit; but between the kidnapping and the point when
LaReigne is found, other life-changing events take place, and the Zhorzha we
see at the story’s end is both wiser and happier than she is at the outset.

Greenwood doesn’t just avoid
stereotypes in recounting Zee’s plight; she knocks the knees from beneath them
and gives us breathing human beings and real world plot points instead, and she
does it without being obvious about it. This is no manifesto; it’s more like a
magnificent modern-day fairytale.

Take Gentry again, for example.
Gentry is autistic, but he is not friendless, and he has some mad skills that take
bullies unawares. Also? Gentry is
adopted. He is white; his adoptive mother is Black. Again, this is incidental
to the story, but readers cannot miss it; there’s a very brief spot that brings
it front and center, and I cheer when I see it.

Those that read my reviews know
that I seldom gush, but this story is perfect in so many ways that I cannot
help myself. By this time next year, I will have read roughly 140 more books,
but I will still remember Zee, and I will still remember Gentry. This is among
the sweetest stories of 2019, a new
favorite.

I highly recommend this book to
everyone that has the literacy skills and stamina to brave Gentry’s prose. Get
it at full price or discounted, from the library or stolen. You won’t be sorry.

Attica Locke’s mysteries are consistently excellent, so when
I found a review copy for this first entry in her Highway 59 series, I felt as
if I had struck gold. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Mulholland books. This
book is for sale now.

Darren Matthews is a Black Texas Ranger, and he’s in big
trouble. He’s suspended from the force, and his wife Lisa has thrown him out of
the house until he cleans up his act. She doesn’t want to be married to a man
that is so careless of his own health and safety; if he takes a desk job and
quits drinking, he can come home to his family. But right now he’s on his own,
and right now he’s still drinking, and it is in the process of moving from one
drink to another that he meets Randie, the recent widow of Michael Wright. The
official story the local sheriff tells is that Michael killed Missy Dale, a
Caucasian woman whose body was dragged from the swamp behind Geneva’s bar, and
then himself. The only problem with that theory, Darren discovers, is that
Michael died before Missy. Darren thinks they were both murdered.

As Darren goes deeper into the case, after receiving
short-term, conditional support from his boss, he finds more elements that
suggest a murder and subsequent cover-up. He’s closer to the truth; the sheriff
and another local big-shot are closer to apoplexy; and he’s less likely to go
home to Lisa.

Attica Locke is one of a handful of consistency brilliant
mystery writers in the US. Her capacity to carry me to the murky rural South
and create taut suspension that makes me lean forward physically as I follow
the story is matchless. I’ve read more than a hundred other books between her
earlier work and this one, yet I still remember the characters, the setting,
and above all, that brooding, simmering dark highway. This is what sets her
apart from other authors in an otherwise crowded field.

I also like the way she addresses racism, and here Darren
investigates the role of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas; I ache as I read of
the continuous injustice that Darren, Michael, and so many others face both
within this story and in real life. And I want to cheer when Darren says that
he will never leave, because the ABT and other White Supremacy groups don’t get
to decide what Texas is. It is as much his story as it is theirs, and he will fight
for it.

“Darren had always wanted to
believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that
change might trickle down from the White House. When, in fact, the opposite had
proven true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.”

Darren risks his life once
again in his determination to dig up the rotten hidden truth and lay it out in
the sun where everyone can see it. The ruling scions of Lark are equally
determined to prevent him from doing it. The intensity of this thing is off the
charts, but fortunately I know this author’s work well enough not to start
reading it close to bedtime, because once I am into the book’s second half, I
will have to finish it before I can do anything else, including sleep.

The good news for me and for other Locke fans is that this is the beginning of a series. I received this galley after publication, and now the second of the Highway 59 series, Heaven, My Home, is slated for release in September. (Watch this blog!)

Maud Gage Baum is one of a kind. The godchild of Susan B. Anthony, child of first-wave feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage and an indulgent, progressively inclined father, she is unhampered by many of the traditional expectations that shackled women born during the American Civil War. But though her parents encourage her to develop her mind and talents, they have little prepared her for the wider world that greets her, and when she arrives at the women’s dormitory at Cornell University, she is considered peculiar by her classmates. She is a lonely young woman, until her roommate sets her up with Frank, an eccentric, clever man whose whimsy equals her own. My great thanks go to Net Galley and Random House Ballantine for the galley, which I received free in exchange for this honest review. It will be available to the public tomorrow, February 12, just in time to be wrapped in red paper and given to the bookworm you adore.

Maud’s story comes to us from two different time periods,
one of which starts in 1871 during her childhood and moves forward in linear
fashion, and the other in 1939, when she comes to the set where The Wizard of
Oz is being filmed to fulfill her beloved Frank’s dying wish; he has asked her
to look after Dorothy. And though it
initially means gaining access to the studio through duplicitous means, Maude
befriends the unhappy but massively talented Judy Garland, and advocates for
the intention behind her character, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

I love this book hard. It has an unusual appeal, not a
thriller nor a grab-you-by-the-hair page turner, but rather a strangely
comforting novel, one that offers us the chance to follow Maud to another time
and another place. I read several books at a time, and this one became my bribe
to myself, the reward I could look forward to after completing increments of
other books that I wouldn’t abandon, yet didn’t love as I did this one.

How many times have I reviewed a book favorably yet with the
caveat that it isn’t bedtime reading, and maybe not good for mealtime either?
Listen up. This one is good for both. It will make you appreciate your meal as
you move through the hungry years of the Depression, and as you read about poor
Judy being starved with lettuce and cottage cheese, her penalty for reaching
puberty when the studio wanted her to look like a scrawny waif. And at bedtime,
even the sorrowful passages are wonderfully hypnotic.

The love story between Maud and Frank is one for the ages,
and without Letts, who would have guessed? Midway through the story I felt the
need to know how closely the author kept to the truth, and I skipped to the
notes at the end. I am delighted to say that this writer did a great deal of
research, and she tells the reader specifically where and when she departs from
historical fact for the sake of the story.
The way that the character of Dorothy is invented, based on a string of
actual events from the Baums’ lives, is riveting, and in fact had the author
not told us otherwise, I would have assumed that much of it was made up,
because it’s almost too cool to be true.

Letts develops her characters subtly, with never a
caricature or stereotype. Though her settings are well drawn, this is a
character based book if ever I read one, and it must truly have been a labor of
love. I’ve read a dozen books between this one and the present, yet this is the
title that makes me smile.

This beautifully crafted story is bound to rank high among
the year’s best historical novels. Sweet, soothing, and highly recommended.

The author of this surreal, expertly crafted tale has been called “the Korean Henning Mankell,” but I say he is the Korean Kurt Vonnegut. Enter a world in which the most ignorant and uncurious survive, one in which “Reading books will doom you to a life of fear and shame.” My thanks go to Doubleday and Net Galley for the advance review copy, which I received free in exchange for this honest review. This novel will be available in the U.S. February 12, 2019.

Our protagonist is Reseng. Orphaned at a young age, he grew
up in Old Raccoon’s library. He is an assassin. Killing others for hire has
grown into a huge industry, and the story begins with Reseng watching an old
man through a scope. He has a job to do.

Readers are forewarned that this story is not for the
squeamish, and I almost abandoned it, because although I like dark humor, this
is triple-dark. I set it aside fairly early, unsure whether I was coming back
or not, but despite its brutality, it drew me back, and I am glad I returned to
it.

Bear is Reseng’s friend, and he runs the pet
crematorium. That’s what it’s called,
because the murder industry is still officially illegal; it wouldn’t do to
announce his business as the place to dispose of a freshly assassinated human victim.
Not yet anyway; the way things are going, this may change. Reseng is there on
business, though, because the old man he just killed has to be processed. And
as he and Bear converse on the state of the profession—so many immigrants are
coming to South Korea and taking these jobs; Chinese, North Koreans that sneak
over, Vietnamese. They’ll work cheap, and it makes it harder for guys like
Reseng to get what the jobs are worth. And then there’s outsourcing. Assassins
are hired by plotters, but Reseng reflects that “Plotters are just pawns like
us. A request comes in, and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them
that tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter…You know
what’s there if you keep going all the way to the top? Nothing. Just an empty
chair.”

Reseng’s greatest
concern is Old Raccoon, Reseng’s aging mentor who is being edged out by unseen
forces. Old Raccoon isn’t an assassin, but he has kept himself out of the
crosshairs by permitting his library to be used as a meeting point between
shady individuals looking to make deals. That’s worked for him pretty well, until
recently. Old Raccoon is all the family Reseng has, and so out of concern, he
begins asking questions. It’s a reckless thing to do, and he knows it.

Before long, Reseng’s life turns into a hall of mirrors, and it’s hard to know who to believe, because he can’t trust anyone. Where does Hanja, who was also mentored by Old Raccoon, fit in? What about the cross-eyed librarian? Is she on the up and up, and if so, where did she go? Is The Barber involved here? His queries take him to visit Hanja, who is now wealthy and influential, a giant among giants in the industry, and his offices take up three whole floors in a high-rise building:

“As if it wasn’t ironic enough that the country’s top assassination provider was brazenly running his business in a building owned by an international insurance company; the same assassination provider was also simultaneously managing a bodyguard firm and a security firm. But just as a vaccine company facing bankruptcy will ultimately survive not by making the world’s greatest vaccine but, rather, the world’s worst virus, so, too, did bodyguard and security firms need the world’s most evil terrorists to prosper, not the greatest security experts. That was capitalism. Hanja understood how the world could curl around and bite its own tail like the uroboros serpent…There was no better business model than owning both the virus and vaccine…A business like that would never go under.”

The struggle unfolds in ways that are impossible to predict,
and what kind of fool would even attempt to make sense of it? When challenged, Hanja
tries to warn Reseng that when an anaconda tries to swallow an alligator, it
instead dies of a ruptured stomach, but Reseng will not be stopped. His journey
builds to a riotous crescendo, and there’s a point past which it’s impossible
not to read till the thing is done.

It’s a scathing tale of alienation told by a master
storyteller, and the ending is brilliant as well. There’s nobody else writing
anything like this today. Highly recommended.

I fucking love this book. I received an advance reader’s
copy free courtesy of Net Galley and Doubleday, and I am late with my review,
but it’s not too late for you. This dark, brooding tale of family secrets that
intertwine with the present is both a literary gem and a deeply absorbing read.
It’s for sale now.

Cole owns a construction business in the Pacific Northwest,
but he returns to his childhood home on a mission to purchase some wood, a
hard-to-find variety of chestnut. He hasn’t been back in thirty years, but now
he is mature and ready to face the old house, or so he thinks. It’s the first
time he’s been to his family’s Connecticut home since it happened. The family’s
historical colonial home is located on Old Newgate Road, which leads to Old
Newgate Prison; the way that he recalls that his parents posed and made much of
this place and then the way that they treated each other and their children are
juxtaposed in a way that I find absolutely believable.

There is a host of ominous foreshadowing, and the events of
the past are revealed a layer at a time, like an onion, and the way Scribner
uses them in developing his protagonist is brilliant. Each time that I think I
see something in Cole’s behavior that doesn’t make sense, it comes up later and
turns out to be an intentionally included inconsistency related to the
character’s inner struggle. And right
now I feel as if I am making this thing sound so dull—struggle, development,
blah blah blah—but I am not providing specific information the way I ordinarily
would because it would be a disservice to even reveal what we are told at the
ten percent mark, or the twenty.

I read a few negative early reviews, and I suspect these are
due to the unfortunate tendency to overuse specialized terms used mostly by
architects and builders. Perhaps the aim was to make us believe that Cole knows
his field, or maybe it’s a part of the setting. One way or the other, the
author has gotten carried away with it, but the reader that soldiers through
that junk at the outset can expect to see much less of it during the great
majority of the book. I read it digitally and occasionally ran a search as I
was reading, but if any of these terms is useful in understanding the book,
then I am too shallow to see it. You can safely skip over them if you want to
do so, and you will be none the poorer for it.

The best lines of the story go to Cole’s adolescent son,
Daniel, a social justice warrior who gets into trouble at school when he pushes
boundaries; Cole brings him to Connecticut to work the fields as he himself did
in his teens, and this is when the story starts to hop. I spent my career
teaching adolescents, and over the years I had five of them at home. If there
were a weak point in Scribner’s construction of Daniel, I would see it (as
several other unfortunate authors can attest.) Daniel is bright, insightful,
and rebellious, and everything he says and everything he does builds a credible
character. By the halfway mark, my notes are written to the protagonist rather
than to myself, the publisher or the author; I’m watching this kid and telling
Cole to listen to him. Daniel is almost a prophet, and he’s almost a one person
Greek chorus, but he is still always, always a kid, impulsive, full of passion,
and unafraid to say what he sees, what he thinks, and what he knows. If I were
to make a short list of my favorite fictional teenagers, Daniel would be on it.

That being said, this story calls for at least a high school
literacy level, even if you skip the architectural and woodworking terms.
Because of the many memories that flood in when Cole returns home, I suspect
that those of us that came of age in the 1970s (give or take) may enjoy it most;
however, for younger readers it may have
a bit of a noir flavor.

Our story is set in the imaginary town of Santa Lora, California, a college town in the hills of Southern California. It’s sunny, green, and beautiful; parents feel safe bringing their children here…until one by one, they fall sick. No one can identify the illness; it’s “a strange kind of slumber, a mysterious, persistent sleep.”

I read this book free and early in exchange for this honest review. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Random House; this title will be available to the public tomorrow, January 15, 2019.

Kara is the first, and roommate Mei, who is shy and hasn’t made friends yet with Kara or anyone else, is shuffled from her original dorm room to another. Then other students fall sick, and those in charge can’t decide what to do, so they do what administrators do best: they craft rules that change often and invent multiple layers of bureaucratic red tape. There’s a quarantine imposed. Parents aren’t allowed in; students aren’t allowed to leave. But they do it anyway. These are college kids. You can’t really tell them what to do, and even under guard, some are ingenious enough to escape.

Under guard! Now the parents are going nuts. Lawyers are called; who wouldn’t?

Meanwhile the illness spreads into the town anyway, because the college employs instructors, cleaning staff, and other adults that don’t live in dormitories. At first it’s kept quiet, since the trustees don’t want negative press getting out about their fine institution of learning, but of course eventually word gets out anyway. The kids have phones, after all.

It doesn’t take much time for all hell to break loose.

Walker is a gifted writer, and the story sucked me in and didn’t let me go till it was over. Conceptually it isn’t all that remarkable, but there are two standout features here that elevate it and make it a standout. The first is the prose style, lyrical and accessible, that makes it read like a truly creepy bedtime story for grownups. Some of it is created by short sentences that use repetition expertly, and the rest is probably just plain magic.

But the main thing that makes me love this book is the dead accurate character development. Those that read my reviews know that nothing makes me crankier than a novelist that uses child characters that don’t act like children, or that don’t act the age they’re assigned. Here, the reverse is true. Every single character, from pre-teenage Sara and younger, mid-elementary age Libby; to the late teen and young adult college students; to the young professors with the newborn; to the older resident with a partner in assisted living are written in age appropriate thought and deed. I confess I was surprised to see how young this author is, because I could swear she had personally experienced each of these age groups.

All eight characters that we follow are so well developed that I feel I’d know them on the street, and I care about what becomes of them. The impulsive, judgmental, occasionally reckless yet heroic Matthew, who steals Mei’s heart and then crushes it is the sort of kid I have taught in years gone by, and for that matter, so is Mei. And oh how my heart aches for Sara and Libby, whose father’s conspiracy-oriented paranoia is difficult to separate from his genius. I’ve known this guy too; when he speaks, you never know how to tease apart the brilliant parts from the crazy. With their mother dead, Sara and Libby have been sworn to silence about any number of things and told never to trust outsiders. Their home is in disrepair, and he tells them that if others can see inside, social workers will cart them away and they will never see him or each other again. And so when he falls asleep and they cannot wake him, they have a real dilemma. I want to dive into the book and carry those girls away—together—myself.

And then I remember—oh yeah, they’re fictional.

Other compelling characters are Catherine, the psychologist called in as a consultant and then not permitted to go home to her toddler when the quarantine is imposed; Ben and Annie, who try to protect their newborn; and Nathaniel, whose partner, Henry, is in assisted living. And though I ache for all of these characters, there are moments when humor is salted in, and so it remains a fun read. I thought the ending was perfect.

There’s a lot more I can say, but I can’t say it like Walker does. This is a fast read and the ultimate in escapist fiction. I highly recommend it.

If I had prize money to bestow, I would divide it between the authors of these two matchless works of fiction, which in my eyes are the best of 2018. Interestingly, both feature strong women as main characters, and both are Southern fiction. If you haven’t read them yet, do it now.

Nelson Mandela’s hundredth birthday approaches. His grandson Ndaba, whom Mandela raised following his release from prison, talks about growing up with the titan that led the movement against Apartheid in South Africa. He reflects on Xhosa culture and the role that it played in the struggle and in his own development, and it is within this framework that he talks about his grandfather, and about the future of his people.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Hachette Books for the review copy, which I received free and early.

Ndaba spent his early years moving between his parents’ households. His mother struggled with alcoholism and other disorders; his father was ill, and would later die from AIDS. He tells of the surreal juxtaposition of the slum that had been his entire experience with his grandfather’s house, where he had his own room, food that was healthy and prepared for him, clothing, and even a video game system; it was just about everything a child could ask for, but it came at the price of separation from his mother, and he rebelled and acted out in response. As a man with a wider view of the past, he recognizes that this was by far the best outcome, but for many years he resisted, yet was safe because of his grandfather’s stable influence and wisdom.

He speaks of having come to Disney World as a youngster, where he was engaged in conversation with a friendly American, who asked him, as they stood in line for a ride, how big the lions are in Africa. Ndaba, of course, grew up in an urban environment and had no more seen a lion wandering around than the questioner had. He came to realize that these are the stereotypes that the Western world has for Africa: lions in rural areas, and crime in the cities. Dangerous animals; dangerous people. He suggests that the U.S.A. improve its own police forces before presuming to talk to South Africans about theirs.

He has a point.

The entire memoir is told using Xhosa folk tales as allegory, and the result is glorious and deeply moving. Although I seldom become teary while reading, a good hard lump formed in my throat when he spoke of taking his grandfather on his final journey to Capetown.

Highly recommended to everyone, whether you know the history of the South African Revolution or are new to it.